Founding editorial
Why the Journal of Human Science & Technology Exists
Human science and technology increasingly share the same questions, yet too often publish in separate intellectual worlds.
Human beings do not arrive in separate compartments. Biology, behavior, environment, culture, measurement, and technology meet in every person. Yet the institutions that study them often remain divided by discipline, method, and vocabulary.
The Journal of Human Science & Technology exists to create a rigorous meeting place for those domains. Its purpose is not to blur scientific boundaries. It is to make the boundaries visible, then ask where careful translation can produce a more faithful account of human health and capability.
Human systems cannot be partitioned cleanly
A physiological signal may be captured by a sensor, interpreted by an algorithm, delivered through a clinical workflow, and acted upon by a person living within a social environment. Each stage can be technically sound while the whole chain still fails. A precise measurement can be attached to a weak construct. A powerful model can optimize the wrong outcome. A useful intervention can become inaccessible through poor design or unequal distribution.
These are not merely engineering problems or medical problems. They are problems of connection. Understanding them requires expertise within disciplines and responsibility across them.
The question is not only whether a technology works. It is what it measures, for whom it works, under which conditions, and toward what human end.
Translation must be rigorous
Interdisciplinary work is often praised in principle and weakened in practice. Terms migrate between fields without their assumptions. Correlation is allowed to impersonate explanation. Novelty receives more attention than validation. Human consequences appear at the end of a paper, after the decisive choices have already been made.
This journal begins from a different premise: translation is itself a scholarly task. Authors should define constructs before measuring them, distinguish signals from interpretations, report limits plainly, and show how a claim changes as it moves from laboratory to model, device, clinic, community, or policy.
Technical sophistication does not excuse conceptual ambiguity. Nor should accessibility require the removal of necessary complexity. We seek work that is both exact and intelligible—writing in which specialists can inspect the methods and readers from adjacent fields can understand why they matter.
Our commitments
The journal will develop with its contributors and readers, but several commitments are foundational.
We will prioritize:
- Human significance alongside technical performance.
- Transparent evidence, including uncertainty, negative findings, and limitations.
- Construct validity before claims of prediction or impact.
- Reproducible methods and clear distinctions between hypothesis, observation, and inference.
- Ethical accountability throughout design, testing, deployment, and evaluation.
We will also label article type and review status clearly. Editorials, perspectives, analyses, methods, and externally peer-reviewed research serve different purposes. Readers should never have to infer which standard has been applied.
What belongs here
JHST welcomes work at the intersections of human biology, health measurement, biomedical engineering, devices and sensors, artificial intelligence, data and systems science, biotechnology, and the ethical governance of emerging tools. The unifying requirement is not a particular technology. It is a serious account of the human question the technology is meant to illuminate or serve.
We are especially interested in work that tests hidden assumptions: whether a proxy represents the condition it claims to measure; whether a result generalizes beyond the population that produced it; whether improved prediction leads to improved decisions; and whether a system’s benefits and burdens are distributed fairly.
A beginning, not a claim of completion
This founding collection establishes a direction. It does not pretend that the journal’s intellectual community is already complete. That community must be built through disagreement, replication, correction, and contributions from people whose disciplines and lived experience expose what others overlook.
The journal exists because the human consequences of science and technology are too important to be left between fields. We invite authors and readers to help create a publication where evidence can travel without losing its meaning—and where technology remains answerable to the people it is designed to serve.